Pakistan's interior minister strongly defended the country's top spy agency today after the publication of leaked documents revealed the US military classified it as a terrorist support entity.
According to the documents published on Sunday, the US military classified the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, or ISI, as a terrorist support entity in 2007 and used association with it as a justification to detain prisoners in Guantanamo Bay.
One document given to the New York Times, says detainees who associated with the ISI "may have provided support to al-Qaeda or the Taliban, or engaged in hostilities against US or Coalition forces".
"I request you to rebut the propaganda being done against our intelligence," interior minister Rehman Malik said today.
"Rebut it forcefully and defend your agencies as the other countries do. This is your national asset and the future of the country."
According to the document, the ISI, along with al-Qaeda, Hamas and Hezbollah and Iranian intelligence, are among 32 groups on the list of "associated forces", which also includes Egypt's Islamic Jihad, headed by al-Qaeda deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri.
It defines an "associate force" as "militant forces and organisations with which al-Qaeda, the al-Qaeda network, or the Taliban has an established working, supportive, or beneficiary relationship for the achievement of common goals".
But Mr Malik said several tactics have long been used to defame Pakistan and the ISI.
"Even today, our ISI is being defamed and efforts are being made to implicate it (falsely). I assure you that the work that is being done by your ISI for the country, no one is doing that," he said.
"The war (on terror) that we are winning, they have a share in it. They have a role in it."
Pakistan army chief general Ashfaq Kayani over the weekend said his forces had broken the back of the militants following criticism from the US top military officer, general Mike Mullen, that ISI was maintaining links with Afghan Taliban.
Pakistan's ISI has long been suspected of maintaining ties to the al-Qaeda-allied Haqqani network, cultivated during the 1980s when Jalaluddin Haqqani was a feared battlefield commander against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.
US-Pakistan ties have been strained this year by the case of CIA contractor Raymond Davis, who shot dead two Pakistanis in Lahore on January 27th, as well as by tensions in Pakistan over US drone strikes that have fanned anti-American sentiment.
Reuters